The Last Stand of Walter White

A cancer-ridden science teacher transforms himself into a sinister meth lord. That's the story of 'Breaking Bad.' But it's also the story of how Bryan Cranston became TV's greatest leading man. As the show enters its final stretch, GQ's Brett Martin discovers why Walter White will always live on

Years ago, in another lifetime—long before the hat, the goatee, the shaved head, before He, the Unholy Ghost, came into Bryan Cranston’s life—the writers on the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle used to play a game in which they invented increasingly violent, absurd, and physically humiliating stunts for Cranston’s character, Hal, to enact. They called it "What won’t Bryan do?" When the game culminated in Hal covered by thousands of live bees, with no protest from Cranston forthcoming, it was deemed unwise to continue.

Instead, a second, corollary game sprang up: "What can’t Bryan do?" Here, too, the writers’ imaginative powers proved inadequate to the task, whether the challenge was roller-dancing or using his body as an enormous nude paintbrush. Even they, though, might have been surprised to know what we now know about what Bryan can do: how he’s transformed himself into Him.

He, of course, is Walter White, whose journey from depressed, terminally ill chemistry teacher to murderous meth manufacturer on Breaking Bad begins its final chapter this month. In an era rife with seductive antiheroes, Walt White’s transformation from, as creator Vince Gilligan likes to say, "Mr. Chips to Scarface" has arguably been the most harrowing—in part because we’ve watched the creation of Heisenberg, as White is known on the street, step by mostly well-calibrated step. "When I first read the script, that’s what struck me: I thought, ’Tony Soprano, Dexter, Vic Mackey. When we were introduced to them, they were already that kind of person,’" says Cranston. "But I’m not sure this has happened before: Where we take one kind of person—bright, depressed, just turned 50, dying of cancer—and say, ’For the next two years, he’s going to go on the greatest roller-coaster ride of his life.’"

Indeed, Breaking Bad’s most impressive accomplishment has been the ruthless commitment with which its creators, Cranston included, have stuck to prosecuting the series’ original mission. One by one, Gilligan and his fellow writers have taken away Walt’s justifications, starting with the cancer, which went into remission, while also giving him something Tony Soprano never had: an adversary and victims you care about with equal depth and fervor. The former is White’s DEA-agent brother-in-law, Hank, with whom White appears to be locked in a zero-sum game; the latter, his family, including his partner and former student, Jesse Pinkman, to whom he plays a poisonous surrogate father. White has emerged as a monstrous distortion of the American fetish for self-actualization, a natural answer to Oprah’s demand to "Live your best life." What, Breaking Bad asks, if your best life happens to be as a drug kingpin?

We’re all sophisticated people here. We understand the profession of acting, the concept of make-believe. And yet eyes are eyes. Visual data is visual data. And sometimes the eyes are more powerful than the brain. People who do Cranston’s job count on that; it’s part of what makes acting work. So one hopes it’s forgivable to sit here in the living room of Cranston’s Los Angeles house, across from the intimately familiar face that is also Walter White’s, and to look for signs. To stare and to wonder: Does it leave a mark?

Lord, but the man would have made a handsome cop. Almost did, in fact. He was first in his class with the LAPD Law Enforcement Explorers, pointed toward the academy and a career with the police force. Watching him now, at ease, it’s impossible not to see it. The Scotch-Irish features; the lithe, compact body: They would have been perfect for some twinkly-eyed kindly officer, walking his beat in blue. It’s been a couple of months since Breaking Bad wrapped and the hair has come back, salt-and-peppering but plenty thick for a 57-year-old. The cheeks, hollowed out for Walt, have filled in. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt and worn slip-on shoes. He is relad.

Cranston has spent his professional life tamping down his good looks, if not always his charm. The poor man has never been allowed to wear decent clothes on-screen—from the brocaded shirts of Tim Whatley, his recurring smarmy-dentist role on Seinfeld, to Hal’s short-sleeve dress shirts, which one imagined coming in a ten-pack from JCPenney. It is safe to say that no other great American actor has spent as much time appearing in his tighty-whities.

Actually, he’s insisted on appearing in them. While shooting the Breaking Bad pilot, Vince Gilligan had a crisis of conscience watching his star thus dressed in the freezing New Mexico desert. "I wimped out," Gilligan says. "I took him aside and said, ’Would you be more comfortable in sweatpants? Or bors?’ He said, ’Yeah, I’d be more comfortable. What’s your point?’ ’So you’re okay with the tighty-whities?’ ’Well, what’s the most pathetic thing I could be wearing here?’ I said, ’Tighty-whities.’ And he said, ’Well, what else do we need to talk about?’"

"I genuinely could not care less how I look," Cranston says now.

Such is the attitude of an actor who spent almost twenty years racking up lunchpail gigs—from Preparation H commercials to Murder, She Wrote—before achieving anything approaching fame. Moreover, he is the child of actors: a mother who gave the profession up to raise her children and a father, Joe, who was handsome and talented but struggled to keep his head above water. "He’d get a job and say, ’Oh, good!’ and then no job and, ’Oh, no.’ Ultimately it was more ’Oh, no’ than ’Oh, good.’ And he couldn’t take the uncertainty of it." When Joe left the business in frustration, his son learned the lesson well: "It doesn’t matter if you’re good. If you’re just good, you won’t succeed. If you have patience and persistence and talent and that’s it, you will not have a successful career as an actor. The elusive thing you need is luck."

Early on, at least, that seemed in short supply. Joe’s departure from show business was part of a larger family breakdown. When Bryan was 12, Cranston’s parents split. The family house was lost, and Cranston and his elder brother, Kyle, lived with their grandparents for a year. He wouldn’t see his father again for a decade. Though they’ve long since reunited, Cranston has never gotten a full accounting of that period in his father’s life and doubts even Joe has faced it head-on. "He’s actually said, ’I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than get on a therapist’s couch,’" Cranston says. "He’s of that generation."

At L.A.’s Canoga Park High School, Cranston was a confused nebbish, a wannabe jock—baseball was his sport—without an ounce of jock swagger. "It was not a great time for me. I was really quiet and unassuming and insecure. And my timidity pushed me to the sidelines, literally and figuratively," he says.

Potential salvation arrived from a strange direction for a teenager growing up in countercultural 1968, just a few years and freeway miles removed from the Watts riots. Kyle had joined the Law Enforcement Explorers—something between a fitness program, a recruitment tool, and the Boy Scouts—that included summer trips to Japan and Hawaii. That looked pretty good to a boy from the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, and Cranston joined up as soon as he was old enough, at 16. That year he was the number one student in the program and, sure enough, got to spend several weeks in Europe, where he tapped into other new sources of power. "I lost my virginity on that trip, in Austria," he says. "And then I lost it in Switzerland, I lost it in Lumbourg, I lost it in France."

Everything seemed on track for a degree in police science and a career rising through the ranks. Instead, a guidance counselor at his junior college intervened, insisting that he take at least one elective. Cranston claims it was as much a function of the alphabet—the options were listed in alphabetical order—as any filial impulse that drove him to choose his father’s profession. "If acting had been called shmacting," he says, "I may have wound up taking archery." Whatever the impetus, he soon discovered that the performing arts, in addition to offering an even more frequent and varied range of virginity-losing opportunities, were another thing he was surprisingly good at.

What can Bryan do?

Just about anything, it seems. He’s a gifted storyteller, an inspired mimic. His next major project will be a play, All the Way, by Robert Schenkkan, which chronicles the first year in the presidency of Lyndon Johnson and will open in Boston this fall. Discussing LBJ, he suddenly slips into a pitch-perfect Texas drawl; you can almost swear you see his jowls swell and droop.

Gilligan, as a writer on The X-Files, learned the extent of Cranston’s abilities when he cast the actor, who had by then had a solid but unspectacular run of mostly TV guest roles. The part was an anti-Semitic lowlife that the audience nevertheless had to grow to care about. "You needed an actor who could play this guy who is an asshole, an unpleasant redneck creep, yet at the end of the hour you need to feel bad that the guy dies," Gilligan says. "Casting bad guys is easy. Casting a bad guy you feel sympathy for is much harder."

In 2000, Malcolm in the Middle came along. The role in the pilot of Hal, the father to four rambunctious boys, was all but an afterthought. "I imagined him as just remote, distant," remembers creator Linwood Boomer. "It was a writer’s conceit that just lay there on the page like a turd." The part was so underwritten that Cranston’s audition, held on the set as it was being constructed, consisted mostly of listening to a fight between the mom and one of her sons. Cranston pulled out a pipe and just watched, head swiveling back and forth between the readers. Boomer fell off his chair laughing.

"People say that, but I literally fell off my metal chair," he says. "He just had this vast inner life going on. You realize, ’This guy looks like he’s listening, but he’s actually building a rocket ship in his head.’"

If you haven’t seen Malcolm lately, it’s worth dipping in for the performance that inspired "What can’t Bryan do?" It is almost as sublime as Cranston’s work on Breaking Bad. Hal and Walter White, in fact, could almost be very estranged cousins; not for nothing is there a joke making the rounds that the end of Breaking Bad should be White entering the witness-protection program and becoming Hal.

Together, the two performances speak to something else essential about Cranston. He’s an immensely physical actor, almost a clown: sometimes a funny clown; other times a very scary clown indeed. The most memorable Walter White moments could almost take place in a silent film: Walt sitting by his stagnant pool, flicking lit matches onto its surface; Walt watching as Gus Fring slits a henchman’s throat with a box cutter; Walt fixing himself lunch. The man makes a sandwich like Chaplin roller-skated.

"He’s telepathic," Gilligan says. "I can’t tell you how much dialogue we’ve cut out of this show over the years in the editing room, stuff that we wrote and really liked, that when we got to the editing room and we said to ourselves, ’You know, we don’t need this line. It’s not necessary, because I see exactly what he’s thinking.’"

That natural style is perfectly in keeping with a show that has always placed the highest value on visual storytelling, that revels in the physical world of significant objects and chemical processes. (Midway through season three, a writer-producer, Peter Gould, approached Gilligan, beaming. "Look at my script," he said. "I’ve counted and there’s five uninterrupted pages where not a word of dialogue is spoken!") This has made Breaking Bad the perfect complement to its hyperverbal network-mate Mad Men; it also might explain why Breaking Bad has never been nominated for a writing Emmy—and, for that matter, why Cranston has thrice beaten out Jon Hamm for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series.

And it’s the thing that the movies haven’t seemed to figure out. Cranston has worked steadily in features—in everything from Oscar-winning Argo and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive to next year’s Godzilla—but nothing has found the resonance of his two transcendent TV roles. Film, by and large, has consigned him to the role of talky, exposition-giving supporting player when his natural position is as silent, magnetic center.

Out in the spacious backyard of Cranston’s house, located on a quiet corner of a residential L.A. neighborhood, he ticks off the names of the trees, including the three—sweetgum, cork oak, and elm—that form the bases for intense family Wiffle-ball games.

There’s an outdoor Ping-Pong table that Cranston grooms as though it were Roland Garros before proceeding to wipe the floor with a visitor in two straight games, the balls darting and spinning like iron filings yanked from the air by a magnet. One kill shot seems to hover in space before dropping to the left, barely nicking the edge of the table.

Gilligan, casting Breaking Bad’s pilot, remembered Cranston from The X-Files. He, too, had a sense there was nothing Bryan couldn’t do, including, he told skeptical AMC and Sony ecutives, transforming himself from bumbling Hal to Walter White. Cranston, for his part, knew immediately what he had. "I told my agent, ’Get me in there as fast as you can, because I know other actors are going to want to lift their leg on this.’ It’s like, ’I want to mark it. I want to spray it with my scent.’"

That meant coming in to his audition with a crystal-clear picture of Walt. "I actually thought of my father, how he stands hunched, burdened," he says, slumping his shoulders. "We didn’t have Walt stand erect until he became Heisenberg." He also had a precise vision of everything from Walt’s weight (186 pounds) to his mustache. "I said, ’I want his mustache to look impotent. I want people to look at it and go, Why bother?’ I thought he should wear clothes that blend into the wall: beige, sand, taupe, khaki. His hair should be a mop. Nothing’s remarkable about this man." The meeting with Gilligan, scheduled for fifteen minutes, lasted an hour and a half; Gilligan emerged committed to fighting for Cranston to get the role. And the Walter White of that pilot—humiliated by his students, receiving a halfhearted birthday hand job from Skyler as she surfs eBay—was so convincing, so fully hatched in his pathos, that it’s impossible even now not to root for him to get up and find his inner Heisenberg.

Cranston has remained in the odd position of both author and consumer of Breaking Bad. He’s an unusually involved actor, directing three episodes himself (including this summer’s premiere) and acting as a producer since season four. His fellow actors say they have come to rely on his almost coachlike leadership, by both example and fiat: Before each season, he would send out a group e-mail exhorting the ensemble to get ready to do their best work. His overall message to his fellow actors, says Dean Norris, who plays Hank, delivered by example day after day, is clear: "That every second in front of the camera is the most important second you have." Leadership, on a show as frequently grim as Breaking Bad, has also meant knowing when it’s necessary to lighten the mood—particularly with the use of prosthetic phalluses, of which the show’s prop department apparently had a disproportionate supply for a basic-cable production.

"Remember, I spent six years seeing the man in his underwear. Sometimes less than his underwear," says Anna Gunn, who plays Walt’s wife, Skyler. "He would constantly try to appear with various...things on his...situation."

"There’s nothing better than a good penis for a laugh," the man himself says.

At the same time, Cranston has followed Walter White much like the rest of us, in single-episode increments. He refused to see scripts, at least those he’s not directing, until four or five days before shooting—a policy that continued right up until the end: "I was enjoying it too much. Asking how it ends would have been like saying, ’All right, tell me what you got me for my birthday and then I’ll open it.’"

That left him with the same questions, speculations, and excited expectations as any viewer.

"I had notions," he says, of The End. "Like, ’What if he created this toxic world around him and, because of his actions, everybody he loved died and he had to stay alive?’ But then I’d think, ’He’s wrought so much, he has to die. Doesn’t he?’ But if he dies, what does he die of? Maybe he dies of cancer. After all this other danger! But my true answer of how I wanted it to end, my honest answer, is this: however Vince Gilligan wants it to end."

The offices of Breaking Bad have, for the past six years, been located in an almost aggressively nondescript building on a bright and barren corner of Burbank, across from a 7-Eleven. There, among the dentists and private investigators listed on the lobby directory, you will find a suite assigned to Delphi Information Sciences Corp. It was the name of the previous tenant, but sufficiently oblique and ominous to retain for the show’s use. It may be the power of association, but everything in the building has a way of taking on a surreal, Breaking Bad&#x2013;like cast: The elevator doors open on a nervous-looking man hauling a box of documents; a work crew silently paints the hallway trim as though cleaning up after a terrible crime.

Behind the door for Delphi Information Sciences Corp., the Breaking Bad offices are in the process of being emptied. The corkboards in the writers’ room, once fluttering with index cards carefully printed with each twist and turn of Walter White’s descent, are empty. Elsewhere on the wall there are a few remnants: a large map of Albuquerque; detailed plans for Walt’s meth "super lab"; an adoring fan letter from Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself—the circuit of TV history closing in an electric sizzle of cool. On a bookshelf sits a very specialized reference library—Money Laundering, Methland, Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture—as well as a Play-Doh model of one of season two’s most indelible images: a tortoise carrying a severed mustachioed head. One floor up, in an editing suite, a single tantalizing frame of the show’s final episode is frozen on the monitors.

For a man responsible for some of the grisliest moments to ever appear on TV, Vince Gilligan is startlingly genteel. Even after six years of the considerable burdens of showrunning, his face remains poised at some pivot point between Virginia gentleman and freshman film student with a huge backpack strapped on both shoulders. If there’s a feel here of the carnival being packed up, there’s also a current of excitement—a distinct, promising sense of having nailed it.

"Maybe I’m too close to it, but I think these final eight episodes have a real chance of satisfying...not everybody—there’s no way to satisfy every last viewer—but the bulk of our viewers," Gilligan says. "I certainly hope so. They satisfy me, and that’s saying a lot."

The Breaking Bad writers’ room was known as one of the more collaborative in television. ("The worst thing the French ever gave us was the auteur theory," Gilligan said. "It’s horseshit.") That spirit applied even to crafting The End, the exact nature of which was undecided for longer than you might expect. "A lot was still in play. You’d be surprised at how much," he says. "There were moments that we thought would be very provocative and evocative and interesting, but we didn’t know their exact full meaning yet. We figured we’d make it up later."

As had happened several times over the course of seasons, the group had set themselves a destination—in the first episode of season five, a flash-forward, we see Walt far from home, with a full head of hair, on his fifty-second birthday—without a clear sense of how they were going to get there. Think of it as Chekhov, with his imprecation about guns appearing in the first act needing to be fired by the third, as hair-raising hedge against writer’s block. In this case, the gun was entirely literal: an M60 assault weapon in Walt’s trunk.

Endings have been among the most contentious aspects of this golden age of cable drama: from the open-ended (The Sopranos) to the generally disappointing (season five of The Wire) to the shows that have not been allowed an ending at all (Deadwood). For Breaking Bad, which always had the tightest narrative intent of all these shows, getting it right may even be more important. The result, not to put too fine a point on it, will determine where the show ultimately ranks in the discussion of the best ever on TV.

"We sat around this table talking about every possible kind of ending," Gilligan says. "Sometimes you start talking really macro. Like, ’What kind of responsibility do we have to find a moral in all this?’ ’Is this a just universe that he lives in, or is it a chaotic universe which is more in keeping with the one we seem to live in?’ ’Is there really karma in the world? Or is it just that the mechanisms, the clockwork, of the universe is so huge and subtle in its operation that we don’t see karma happening?’ We talk about all that stuff, and then, at a certain point, you stop and say, ’Let’s just tell a good story.’"

The writers spent hours discussing the endings of other series, of movies, of books. Surprise or innovation wasn’t necessarily the criteria. "I keep coming back to _MAS*H,_" Gilligan continues. "From the first episode, these people sit around and say, ’All I want to do is go home.’ So of course they all get to go home in the final episode. Sometimes the best moment in a TV show is an unpredictable moment, but sometimes it’s actually being predictable."

By that measure, for those obsessed with guessing ahead, it may be worthwhile to remember Breaking Bad’s first principles, the nature of the project—charting a man’s free fall into the hell of his own worst impulses. And to count the number of endings free falls usually have.

There are two conditions that affect longtime dwellers in dark characters like Walter White—occupational hazards. The first is a creeping association with the character and, inevitably, an insidious desire to protect him or her from looking or acting too bad. Cranston, it seems, is immune to this particular disease.

"When we say ’Camera. Rolling. Action,’ he can be in his underpants, he can be buck naked, he can look like hell warmed over; he doesn’t worry. He lacks all of that vanity shit," says Gilligan. "And forget the physicality: We could have had an actor who would have said, ’You know, my character is kind of an asshole. Why can’t he give his meth earnings to an orphanage in Mexico?’ If we had hired an actor like that, you and I wouldn’t be talking. Because you would have never heard of this show."

The other condition is that the role slowly drives the actor mad.

The late-afternoon sun slants through the window now, as he sits in his kitchen with a glass of wine. His wife of twenty-four years, the actress Robin Dearden, is across the table, and their 13-year-old dog, Sugar, is asleep on the floor.

"He never brings it home," Dearden says. "Never."

"Well, I think, though, that sometimes I brought home a sense of character," he says. "When Walt was getting more and more powerful, I think I’d come home more..."

"Crabby?" Dearden offers, with a chuckle.

"No.... Feeling more powerful, you know. He was expanding the room, filling the breadth of himself."

Still, Cranston admits it’s occasionally been exhausting, and there have been times on set when it couldn’t help but get to him. After a climactic season-two episode in which White, rather than intervene, stands by and watches Jesse’s girlfriend, a junkie, choke on her own vomit, the actor broke down in tears. "There was one point where I was going through the range of Walter’s emotions and, involuntarily, I saw my daughter’s face. I must have been conjuring the idea that she was somebody’s daughter, and I saw Taylor’s face, choking."

And no matter how well-adjusted and virtuosic the actor, playing a character like White is inevitably an uncomfortably intimate dance.

"When you first start working on a character, it remains outside of you," says Cranston, holding his hands far apart. "And then, the more you work on it, it’s like you start dating, getting to know each other, and then trusting each other, feeling confident in each other’s company, until, pretty soon...you kind of glide in." His fingers, slowly moving toward one another, slide into an embrace. "The best condition is when the character seeps inside of you, where you almost ingest it."

Does that mean you can sympathize with Walter White?

"What happened to Walt is something I related to, if I’m truly honest with myself. I’ve come to realize that I think everybody is capable of that. If you came into a condition where you were under tremendous stress. And if I knew what buttons to push that threatened you and yours... You could become an extremely dangerous person."

Do you believe in evil?

"Yeah. I think it’s right next to good, inside every person."

And have you encountered it yourself?

"I had one girlfriend I wanted to kill."

It was a woman he dated after his short-lived first marriage. She was a drug addict, terribly unstable, and she followed Cranston to New York when he left L.A. to work on the soap opera Loving. She stalked him, leaving messages on his answering machine: "I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna cut your balls off. I’m gonna have your dick sawed off." Finally, one day, the woman showed up at Cranston’s Upper West Side apartment, banging on the door.

"And I envisioned myself killing her. It was so clear. My apartment had a brick wall on one side, and I envisioned opening the door, grabbing her by the hair, dragging her inside, and shoving her head into that brick wall until brain matter was dripping down the sides of it. Then I shuddered and realized how clearly I saw that happening. And I called the police because I was so afraid. I was temporarily insane—capable of doing tremendous damage to her and to myself."

But the question remains, Does it leave a mark?

Cranston and Dearden exchange a conspiratorial smile across the table. Well, Cranston says, warming up a story, after the last day of shooting in Albuquerque, a bunch of cast and crew gathered at the hotel bar for a good-bye. The production’s medic and one of the set decorators, a tattoo artist, had the idea of giving a commemorative tattoo to anybody who wanted one. The gear was wheeled in. One camera assistant got an enormous show logo on his ass. Aaron Paul, who played Jesse Pinkman, had no half measures printed along the inside of his biceps.

"Bryan’s not a tattoo guy," Dearden says. "He’s the last person who would ever do it."

"But I wanted something...something that would give me private personal pleasure, like when I pass by and catch a glimpse of a picture of my mom, or my old manager. People who are gone now," Cranston says. "And it seemed appropriate. I mean, Breaking Bad changed my life."

So, did you get one?

He grins, nods.

Can I see it? He’s grinning wider now, nodding more giddily, like a kid with a great secret.

"He can’t see it," Dearden says, laughing.

Am I looking at it RIGHT NOW?

Cranston leans forward, holding out his spread fingers. And there it is, not much bigger than a pair of beauty marks, tucked into the inside of his right ring finger like a shadow wedding band, forever and ever, for better or for worse:

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